The Man With No Name

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Boy, did I have a good productive music weekend. I finished writing a song! Finishing songs is rare for me (I’ve still written under ten of them in my life), but I’m hoping it will get more frequent – I’m not sure if I’ll have enough to release a vanity cd in the next year, but I hope I will someday.

I’d post it here, but I’m feeling a bit… well, shy. But if you want to hear it, drop me a note through Museworld’s contact form and I’ll send you a link. It’s called “Together”, it’s about a house/relationship, and it’s for guitar, voice, strings, and piano. I did it all from home, didn’t book any studio time or anything.

There are probably some minor revisions I’ll want to make after letting it sit for a couple of days, but it’s pretty close to final form. I’m going to enter it in the Portland Songwriters songwriting contest.

So, I launched a bit of a podcast for Thunder-Thumbs. It will have miscellaneous bits of creative writing and other random things I feel like putting up. The first bit is up already. It’s the first chapter of a choose your own adventure that is still in development. There are choices at the end for what you want to hear next.

“No, no…” she muttered, tossing wildly about in the bed until the already tangled bedclothes fell to the floor in a heap. “NO!!!!” she screamed as she jolted upright, covered in sweat and panting thirstily. She staggered out of the bed and went to the sink, gulping down mouthfuls of water straight from the tap. She collapsed in an armchair.

“Shit, I’m going mad,” she said aloud to the deserted room. As she looked around the one-bedroom unit in which she lived, she felt only relief that there was no-one around to see her falling apart at the seams. Some of her friends had wondered lately why she never invited them around any more…not at night. She made up excuses about working late, and they fell for it. She hadn’t gotten drunk since the nightmares had started either…just in case she fell asleep when others were around, and they noticed her problem.

The nightmares had started about a month ago. They’d been formless horrors at the time, meaningless blends of people, blood, and a feeling of all-pervading evil. She’d woken up crying from that one. That was when she’d resolved not to let anyone see her like that. It had been only luck that had kept her secret that night, for Simon had been asleep in the living room. He’d slept right through it, snoring peacefully as though nothing could harm him.

She knew better. Somehow she knew that the nightmares were nothing so uncomplicated. She wasn’t superstitious, but she knew that they were not dreams, but memories…

Memories of the future…

Shaking her head in a futile effort to clear her head, she went to the fridge and pulled out a beer. Drinking long and deep, she tried to relax with the brew, but couldn’t rid herself of an image of a time when no such relaxation would be available. A time when sleep would be a luxury available to the privileged few, and barely imagined by the downtrodden masses. She shuddered at the memory of the drugs coursing through her veins.

Damn, she said, realising that she was convincing herself more every night of the reality that she could only access in her dreams. Less and less did the everyday world seem like a place where she belonged…she caught herself wishing that she could belong here, wishing that it wasn’t just a daydream from which she would always awaken in the grim world that was her…future.

She knew that it was a future to come, a future where something had gone terribly wrong with human evolution. She also knew that somehow, she had to prevent it.

The next day, looking haggard and sleepless, she went into her computer lab and set up for the day. She almost shuddered as she touched the keyboard, remembering one of the nightmares…the one where the computer had almost taken over her mind, and would have, had not the fortuitous ringing of her telephone brought her back to the twentieth century. Somehow she had the feeling that had that not happened, she would have been lost, to both worlds…her real-time body a decomposing vegetable to be found some day by the landlord.

Sensing time pass, she reluctantly tuned into the computer network with which she commuted daily. Thank god it’s still manual… she thought, flinching at the memory of those cold, sharp needles.

Between routine assignments, she often received mail from friends around the world, and read news articles that others sent to her. She stared in shock as she read:

I had a dream the other night...I was lost in the future,
and somehow I knew that it was the future, not just any
future, but ours... I was drugged and hooked up to the
Net by electrodes...they knew my every thought, the gov-
ernment...but they didn't know that I was one of the ones
that they were hunting, the "States"... It was an awful
future, and at the time I wanted to save it...and when I
woke, I couldn't shake the feeling that I, here in the
twentieth century, might be able to, if I could find
others like me, with the ability to exist in two times
at once...

Ok, so it's weird...is this astral travel? Am I mad? Can
anyone give me a good explanation???

“Oh my god,” she whispered to herself. “I wonder…”

Trying to keep her letter as flippant as the tone of the article, she wrote to the sender of the dream sequence. What should she write?

Dear Robert,

I read your article concerning your dream sequence...I
realise that this might sound a little silly, but I've
had similar ones myself. I wonder if this is just a
coincidence.

I wonder if the name Thunder-Thumbs means anything
to you?

She sent it off before she could change her mind. So a complete stranger will think I’m mad…doesn’t matter…

Staring at the screen, her eyes lost their focus.

It was underground…a large cavern full of hollow-eyed men and women, none of them well-fed, and none of them looking for a way out. They were the few left in the population with any hope remaining. The government was continually hunting them, and occasionally found some of them, but not even with their torture could they find any proof. These were the living proof that the omniscient technology that ruled planet earth had flaws. Not many, it was true, and they were all careful not to flaunt those that they had found, in case they were discovered.

They were a suspicious group, no-one knew the real names of the rest, and no-one asked. In a world where every piece of information was available, and mostly for no price at all, the privacy that this group maintained was a sure sign that they had not been infiltrated. As they sat by candle light, the sounds of distant rioting formed a background noise that no one noticed…it was all too common these days. And the common link that formed this group, the way they had found each other, was that all could remember another, better time.

No one had yet pinpointed whether they had returned there, or been thrown here…or maybe both. None of them could clearly remember the time of transition, either.

The words on the computer screen coalesced into sense once again. She looked around, and was thankful that no-one had seen her lost to her thoughts. She had a feeling that something momentous was about to begin, though she couldn’t say why. She stared at her computer screen and waited.

Hey, if you’re here, it means that you actually are curious about me. Not just the subject material of myotherwritings.

Say, that’s nice.

Or, perhaps you remember the legend of Thunder-Thumbs, and are realizing that it is time for him to stir.

I’ll write some about personal stuff. And I’ll also share a bit about the legend of Thunder-Thumbs. Or perhaps the story of Gemnight. Or the goings-on over at Esterton, which didn’t even exist until just a few minutes ago. Perhaps even Detective Pogue will stop in occasionally…. if he can find the door.

So sit back, relax, and get ready for some stories. They may not appear to have any point – at first. I make no promises that they’ll ever have any point. And you may be bored in the telling.